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A local health care fraud prosecution drew the national spotlight this afternoon when the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging took testimony in Washington, D.C., about a Rochester Hills physician during its hearing on efforts to combat Medicare fraud.

Patricia Gresko, a Romeo resident and former patient of Farid Fata, was among the witnesses appearing before the committee chaired by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., to discuss her case.

Fata, owner of Rochester Hills-based Michigan Hematology Oncology Centers PC and founder of the nonprofit Swan for Life Cancer Foundation, faces almost 20 federal charges including health care fraud, conspiracy to pay or receive kickbacks and unlawfully procuring naturalization in the United States in a fraud scheme officials have valued at more than $225 million.

It was a banner year nationwide as well. The federal Medicare Fraud Strike Force, deployed in nine cities including Detroit where the federal government has found outsized Medicare billing volumes since 2007, charged 345 people and obtained 234 guilty pleas and 46 jury trial convictions.

Recent data assembled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University determined the federal government had a total of 377 such prosecutions nationwide in fiscal 2013. That’s up 3 percent over the previous year and the largest year of prosecutions since the current health care fraud statute was enacted in the mid-1990s.

The Eastern District of Michigan, the federal judicial district that includes Detroit and its suburbs, ranked fourth among all court districts nationwide at about seven prosecutions per million residents, behind the Southern District of Illinois, the Southern District of Florida and the District of South Carolina. The national average was about 1.2 prosecutions per million area residents.